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Originally Posted by host
alansmithee, I know that your comments quoted above were directed at Manx, who originally jumped in to counter some points that you had made in an exchange of posts with me.
I want to point out that ignorance or incomplete understanding of the restrictions put on government as to it's power to restrict freedom of speech and expression, as stated in the U.S. Constitution and in it's initial amendments, (the Bill of Rights), are just that......a shortcoming in the opinions of many people living in the U.S. today.
alansmithee, here's a <a href="http://www.aclu-mass.org/legal/docket_2002-2003.asp">link</a> to the issues list that the ACLU Massachusetts chapter was involved in from 7/2002 to 6/2003, including "Curley v. Nambla".
The ACLU is in a place in time now that may have a lot in common with the place that Abu Ghraib whistleblower Josep M. Darby finds himself in. His community is polarized in it's reaction to his act of conscience. How would you treat him if he came home to your town? Your opinion of the ACLU FOIA efforts seems ripe for revision. It seems un-American. If you disagree, what do you see our military "fighting for" in Iraq ? What principles do we stand for, and expect our troops to stand for ? How do we postpone investigating the possible torture and abuse of prisoners, and the possible illegal acts of the Bush administration, and still maintain and display our American values and integrity to our enlisted ranks in the military, to the Iraqi people, and to a world that is watching intently to see whether we are a fair and benevolent superpower, or something else ? |
I personally think that Abu Ghraib was very overblown. Comparing it to the My Lai massacre is like comparing a high school hazing to the Columbine school shootings. Sure, they both happened in school settings, but the degree is very difference. If I saw him, I would respect his service but disagree with his actions. I don't think him or his family should be harassed, though.
As for what our military is fighting for, I really have no idea anymore. But IMO the military has no reason to show integrity, or nobility, or anything along those lines; it's job is to kill people as efficiently as possible. Anything that impedes the military from doing it's job with as little loss as possible is bad. The military should have no other considerations while in active conflict. After the conflict you can go back and challenge what took place during, but not before. To use a metaphor, if someone sets your house on fire, you don't start the trial while the house is still on fire. You put the fire out, then see what caused it, what motives were involved, etc.
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Since you have yet to propose an immediate replacement for the ACLU, and you stated that U.S. war crimes do not fall into a category of our timely "right to know", I won't be surprised if you don't take the time to examine the list and post comments about it.
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I wasn't going to check this link initially, as I read the ACLU's main homepage, but I saw that comments might be in order, so here's a brief overview of the section I read. There were some points I disagreed with the ACLU's position (Curley v. NAMBLA, Commonwealth v. Kundrot, Demarest v. Athol/Orange Community Television, Inc, Ridley v. MBTA, Change the Climate v. MBTA) but for the most part I think they were serving the best intrests of society. There were a couple I actually found humerous (Five Unnamed Students v. Montachusett Regional Technical High School, and also the religious case where Falwell's legal staff refused to work with the ACLU). I had some misconceptions about the ACLU before I made my initial comments (which I found after looking on their website for my posts above). But I didn't bother posting them, because they didn't seem fitting in the spirit of this thread.
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I thought of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam when I read your justification for postponing the people's oversight of government's prosecution of war. You make statments that help to persuade me that you are a blinded by a misplaced patriotic sense that it is not possible for you federal government's leaders to be war criminals and perpetrators of an illegal war of aggression, and.....more alarming.....that the assertion by the ACLU of all of our legal rights, in the use of the federal courts to compel the government to disclose the paper record of what it is involved in as far as the prosecution of that possibly illegal war, somehow "undermines" our military, so those inquiries should be postponed until "later"?
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I think it would take alot more than what has currently occured to raise our government to the level of war criminals, or of waging an illegal war. I don't think that if the government were really war criminals it COULD be hidden, therefore you can't expose it. That is why the inquiries should be postponed until the end of conflict-they do nothing to put an acceptable end on the conflict, and can only exacerbate a bad situation.
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Mull over the possibility, however remote it may be to your way of thinking, that nothing undermines our military more signifigantly than the waging of illegal war of aggression and the torture and abuse of those detained by our military in the course of waging this war, and the destruction of evidence by the military of the commission of war crimes, and the failure to investigate reports of these crimes in a timely and honest way. Here is what can happen when the military and the citizens are not committed to the principles set forth by Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg in 1946:
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The only thing that can undermine the military is something that hurts the swift performance of their task, which boils down to systematically killing people designated as the enemy. If energy is focused while in the middle of conflict on anything but the conflict, the military is harmed. There should be investigation into alleged crimes, but it should happen in the aftermath of the war, not during it.